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I am playing as the japanese in a 3.0 PBEM game. It is August of 1943 and I have lost 625 AKAs and only have ~500 left. 99% of my merchant losses have been to submarines. In one bad week in january 42, I lost 44 AKAs and 7 tankers. The only way I have been able to slow the loss rate to less than 10 merchants ships per week is to base at least half of my bettys and all of my mavis/emilys in or near Indonesian waters on daytime missions.

Was submarine effectiveness tweaked in 3.0/3.1? Typically the american submarines under perform their real world examples in this game, so I do not mind a correction in their favor.

However, american submariners did not even have a even 50% reliable torpedo for their fleet boats till late 43. So I have to think that losing nearly 60% of my merchant fleet half way through 1943 is kind of absurd.

Has anybody else noticed this? Or am I just a victim of bad luck in this particular game?

I've noticed it too. with 4 patrol groups, 2 betty groups in tokyo, nagoya, oasaka and the next base over, i lost 8 AKs, 1 BB, 1 CVL, 1 CVE, 2 AO within 2 hexes of tokyo. All that in one turn.

Hi:
where are your dd and de's located at ? they play a major role in asw

all of my DEs, all of my CDs, 5 units of DDs are in Nagoya. I should add that this was in Febuary 1942.

Also, the damaged BB that was sunk had a 4xDD escort, the 2 AOs sunk were with a 3xDD escort, and the CVL and CVE both had a 3 DD escort.

I just had a turn( against wflarry) where I lost 15 MCS units next to the PI. These were routine supply units. I have a size 40 Ki-46-II unit in Manila, 3 hexs away, no subs were distroyed. I really don't think the americans were able to come close to this performance. Again, Febuary 1942.

I have the few DE's and other escorts all at Nagoya. Also have about 8 DD. Moving about 40 more DDs there now to see if they help stem the tide, but it is really too late in this game. Lost another 30 merchants last turn.

I have noticed in my other 3.1 game against nomad that my subs are delivering much higher results than I have ever seen. The subs he mentions sinking 15 merchants near the PI are old salmon class boats based out of Cairns.

There were a few things that I modified about subs.

#1. Decreased the durability for Japanese subs.

#2. Added the Balao class sub, equipped with a late war torpedo that appear later in the war.

#3. Increased the number of subs in the groups of obsolete vessels to free up spaces for more newer subs to appear.

The durability of the vessel determines its chance of getting sunk in a counterattack. Since Japanese subs tended to be sunk once found, lowering this value increased losses to historic numbers, and made sitting around the US merchant areas dangerous (so they will go to the more contested battlegrounds to pick on military vessels). However, this would not affect USN ship sinkings by subs.

The Balao class starts to appear in late 1943, I believe, so this is well after the reported sinkings of IJN merchants stated.

The number of subs per group might be causing this, because the more subs in a group, the better they are at remaining hidden and doing a lot of damage to their opponent (like working in a wolfpack).

In 3.2 I put back some of the auto-reinforcements for Allied and Japanese MCS, so you will get some replacements for these losses.

Jeremey and Mika, is it possible that you made a change to the exe file that is making the american subs more powerful?

I went in and looked at the obc_a and obc_c files for ver 2.3 and 3.1.

the number of sub units are the same. the number of subs in the units are the same. the stats for the subs are the same. the stats for the MK-iv torp is the same.

Any other reasons that the sub sinkings seemed to jump from ver 2.3 to 3.1?

We did nothing to the EXE. However, we did notice that when you change, say, value X of subject X, subject Y, Z, A, B, C, D, E, F, etc... experience some change. Sort of like the butterfly flapping its wings in Malaya creates a storm in Mexico. There might have been changes in the OBC files or the EXE that do not seem immediate, such as changes to IJN Merchant shipping, possibly even ASW values, ASW aircraft range and number, etc..., that might result in more kills by USN subs.

ok, thanks jeremey. looked at the japan MCS and TK speeds.

they are as follows:
type ...... ver 2.3 ...... ver 3.1
3000K ...... 12 ....... 10
6000K ...... 14 ...... 12
10000K ..... 18 ..... 14
TK .............. 11 ......... 11

I would guess that the speed difference is making a very large difference in MCS shipping being sunk. I did not notice any difference in TK losses.

I think 3.0 had the same speed values but smaller Patrol group sizes. This is probably why wflarry found 3.0 extremely hard as japan and we are finding 3.1 sometimes abnormal. some turns I lose 1-5 MCS units, other turns I have lost up to 37 MCS units.

Speed it must be, there's a function called ship_evasion that takes into account targets speed, damage and other relevant modifications. So change in speed results in inversely relative change in hits.

before we started our newest PBEM game, I edited the speeds to +2 for all Japan MCS units. I'll see if that helps. thanks Mika.